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Best Cookin’ Show Ever

“Cookin’ Cheap” was true to its name. It was a TV show about cookin’, and it was cheap. It came from a public television station in Roanoke, Va., in 1981, and went national for a while on PBS. That was when I saw it, and was floored.

I wish I could tell everyone I know to tune in, but you can’t anymore. The show went off the air in 2002, and the master tapes were thrown away. It survives only in a few YouTube clips and a DVD that I recently bought online. It has four episodes out of hundreds — shards from a lost monument of cooking-show greatness.

“Greatness” in this case needs explaining.

It isn’t the food. The recipes come from viewers, the ingredients from freezer, can and cardboard box. In the clammy studio light, the dishes — casseroles and meatballs, bean salads and dips — often end up looking like glop.

It isn’t the culinary skill. The hosts, Laban Johnson and Larry Bly, were amateurs. They struggle to open zip-lock bags and fumble in their oven mitts the way you or I would. Their kitchen gets messy and sometimes dangerous, as they juggle hot trays and gesture while chopping. They puzzle over pronunciations and employ questionable knife techniques. They spend a lot of time on boring prep work, because, as Larry confesses, if they didn’t, the show would be a lot shorter.

No, what makes this show so good is all of the above, plus the chemistry of Laban and Larry. They are tall (Laban) and short (Larry), chunky and skinny, and they bicker, josh and giggle (and sometimes dress) like a couple of old ladies. What they created is honest and funny, a surreal parody of a cooking show that is also a heartfelt display of genuine Southernness.

What I love most is that it’s not just more of that fake Southern thing, which is all around us.

Laban and Larry are the real Virginia deal. When they get to their regular cross-dressing segment, dispensing advice as the Cook Sisters, there’s a strong suggestion that something here is not being discussed, but their matter-of-fact self-assurance feels candid anyway. Somebody once wrote an academic paper about the show. It said the men embodied the old Southern archetype of the gentle mama’s boy, an emblem of that region as traditional as that of the beer-swilling good ol’ boy, though far less celebrated.

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Maybe. But enough of that, let’s watch Laban take the skin off some chicken thighs for a baked dish sent in by April from Norfolk. It’s a slimy struggle, and Laban gets distracted and then irritated by the advertising card at the bottom of the foam package. He pauses to honor the memory of the three chickens who gave their legs for his supper. This is taking a while. Then he wipes his hands and stops. “That’s all I want to do right now,” he says. Now it’s Larry’s turn. Larry starts making cobbler.

Back and forth they go, step by step, till they finally carry dishes over to a side table under a poster of a pig napping in a hammock. There they sit a while, chewing, trying to decide if they like what they just made. This is not always the case. “Well, it’s unusual,” Laban says of April’s chicken. Larry tries some. He looks in the camera: “April, it’s O.K., don’t give up. Work on it a little, but don’t give up.” Then he declares the cobbler not bad.

Perfection belongs to God, not us, the Southern author Flannery O’Connor would have told you, her eyes boring holes in yours as she poured Coca-Cola in her coffee. Our world is for frozen green beans, slimy chicken skin, a not-bad cobbler. It’s for the mayonnaise that refuses to set as Laban, with the blender cover off and the motor on too high, pours oil from a measuring cup. It’s tilted at that awkward angle where oil dribbles off the cup’s lip and bottom edge at the same time, in two messy streams that Laban tries to keep centered over the blender as oil splatters everywhere.

Maybe he knows there’s a smarter way to do it, maybe he doesn’t, but this is the way he has chosen. He’s not an idiot, he’s just cookin’, and making Larry laugh. They both know it will turn out good, or at least good enough, which, at this moment, to this viewer, is great.

A version of this editorial appears in print on March 29, 2010, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Best Cookin’ Show Ever. Today's Paper|Subscribe